Albury filmmaker woos festival circuit

INTREPID: Dan Jackson's documentary In the Shadow of the Hill, which focuses on life in Rio's slums, is up for five AACTA Awards next month.

An Albury filmmaker's debut documentary has cleaned up since its June release, having been nominated for five Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards and winning best documentary at the Sydney Film Festival.

Brazilians say nobody sane would choose to live in a favela, but Dan Jackson did just that, moving to Rio de Janeiro’s Rocinha to film In the Shadow of the Hill, which follows a brutal police crackdown after the city secured the World Cup and Olympics.

And rather than killing people the police make them disappear, leaving no trace of their crimes: up to 38,000 people from Rio’s slums went missing between 2007 and 2013 as part of its Orwellian-named pacification program.

The film focuses on the disappearance of a local brick layer, what caused it and what happened next. The search for him captured the heart of the city, and it turned into a citywide protest movement against police brutality.

But with both sporting events now over, Jackson’s film has taken on even more pertinence.